Project Sewn Theme 1

Hey everyone! The first theme for the Project Sewn competition is the Leading Ladies Challenge. Over the past few years I have become fascinated with Edie Sedgwick (I did a little write up on her here), famously known as Andy Warhol's muse in the 1960s. The movie Factory Girl is based on Edie's life during that time period and is filled with amazing fashion designed by John Dunn. When this challenge was announced, I knew exactly who I wanted to emulate. Edie was known for wearing striped boatneck shirts and throughout the movie she wore a red and black striped dress with the stripe placement on a diagonal. Stripe matching is a sewing technique that I have always been "afraid" of and I never dreamed about matching them on a diagonal. But, hey, Project Sewn is all about pushing yourself, right?


Before cutting into my final fabric I made a wearable muslin with horizontal stripes. It took some trial and error, but I did a decent job of matching up the sides. I realized that it was hard impossible to match everything up by cutting the pieces on the fold, so for my final version of the dress I traced the pattern twice, taped it along what would have been the "cut on the fold" line, and had very little issues matching up those crazy diagonal pieces. I did hold my breath while cutting though haha.


I used the Coco pattern for the dress and the cardigan is a modified Renfrew shirt, both great knit patterns. For the dress I did not have to do any alterations, which was pretty awesome.

This was also my first time sewing a cardigan and now I feel like a whole new world has opened! Cardigans all day, every day, and in every color! I 95% copied my buddy Andrea's tutorial which was great and super easy to follow. She took all the guess work out of it for me, so thanks, Andrea! I owe you a Moscow Mule.

The cardigan is lengthened a bit from the instructed length because I prefer them longer. The size is a bit larger than what I normally wear to account for the fact that I'm always going to wear something underneath it. I added a placket to the front and other than adding some length to the neck band and bottom band to account for the added placket I didn't make any changes. The funny part is that I didn't add buttons! Never in my life have I ever buttoned up a cardigan (is that weird?), so I left them off the garment.